The Consolidation Session

I don't believe that the players rolled a single dice-roll "in anger" during today's session. I made a couple. It was what I think of as a consolidation session.

A consolidation session is one serving two functions: tying up loose ends and taking care of housekeeping and logistics; and psychological downtime. It will generally only become necessary in a long-term, open-ended campaign, but in such a campaign it is vital. 

Stuff happens in such a session. Treasure needs to be sold, magical items identified, rumours investigated, hirelings hired and equipped, mid-long term plans discussed, and construction projects commenced. Time is often accelerated - we covered about 9 days' worth of events in the space of two hours today.

At the same time, in a long-term campaign stuff sometimes needs not to happen. If there have been week after week of high-octane excitement and danger, the players and DM benefit from a low-intensity breather. This might seem strange to say, given that there is a gap of a week between each session, but a D&D campaign has its own rhythm - its own, parallel reality - and just as the PCs would need a bit of a holiday after a dangerous journey or dungeon delve, so sometimes do the players. 

The benefits of the consolidated session are felt in future weeks. Next time, the players will be ready to embark on what will feel like a new chapter, refreshed and reinvigorated. The PCs will be full of hit points, armed to the teeth, and with a new crew of underlings to replace their dead. It is the equivalent of the feeling an audience and actors share as the theatre darkens and the curtain raises after the interval in a play or musical. We've had our half-time ice cream, beer and toilet break, and now we're ready for action with renewed purpose. 

Incomplete Archive of Evocative Illustrations from the Forest of Doom

Malcolm Barter is listed as the interior illustrator for The Forest of Doom, the first Fighting Fantasy book I must have read (I think I was about 9 or 10). Some of these images have remained with me ever since; they seemed incredibly grown-up to my primary school mind - in a stratosphere of sophistication in comparison to the cartoonish things I had been exposed to in kids' books. 

Here are some favourites:

Now, what strikes me about them is their strange combination of understatedness and detail. Barter's world is grimy, lived-in, stark: it concedes nothing to modern nerd-dom's insistence on all-awesome, all the time. What you see is what you get. These pieces do not, like a modern D&D piece, depict larger-than-life heroes who the viewer is supposed to fantasise about becoming. No; they depict a real, inhabited world, with all its flaws, disappointments, sorrow and bathos.

I'm curious to know what happened to Mr Barter. Biographical information on the internet is scarce. Something about these pieces suggest that, given time and money, he could have produced work of (even more) exquisite skill. Yet he seems to have subsequently disappeared. 

Earwigmen

Earwigmen

Loathsome, bellicose insectoids, as bloody-minded and difficult to kill as their diminutive colleagues, earwigmen rove in matriarchal warbands, each band worshipping a malevolent god of its own.

Male: HD 1+1, AC 5, #ATT 1, DMG 1d6 (short sword, hand axe, spear) +1, Move 120, ML 8

Female: HD 2+1, AC 5, #ATT 2, DMG 1d6 (short sword, hand axe, spear) +2/1d3 (pincer), Move 120, ML 9

*The pincer attack will latch on after a successful hit, doing 1d3 hp damage automatically each round thereafter

*Regenerates 1hp per round unless killed outright

Matriarch: HD 3+3, AC 4, #ATT 2, DMG 1d8 (long sword, battle axe)+2/1d4 (pincer), Move 120, ML 10

*The pincer attack will latch on after a successful hit, doing 1d4 hp damage automatically each round thereafter

*Regenerates 3hp per round unless killed outright

Earwigmen are encountered in groups of 3-18 (of which 1 in 4 are females) or in lairs of 55-100 (of which  1 in 4 are females and one is a matriarch; three other females are 2nd level magic-users). 

A group of earwigmen has a 1 in 3 chance of being accompanied by a giant earwig; a lair will include 1d6+3 of them.

Giant earwig: HD 4+4, AC 4, #ATT 2, DMG 1d6+2 (pincers)/1d6 (bite), Move 180, ML 9

*The pincer attack will latch on after a successful hit, doing 1d6+2 damage automatically each round thereafter

*Regenerates 3hp per round unless killed outright

[SIGNAL BOOST: My friend and sort-of neighbour Dan has a kickstarter that might be relevant to your interests: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dansumption/mostly-harmless-meetings-a-zine-of-countryside-encounters]

No Take-Backs?

As I get older, I become less interested in coming across as an infallible DM. If I was flattering myself I would say this is because I have become more secure; if I was being more realistic I might admit that I just give less of a shit than I used to about most things, as is true for all of us once we hit 40. 

This means my approach to gaming has become much more relaxed over time. I don't mind "breaking the fourth wall" where required. If I've made a mistake I'll usually own up to it. If I'm not sure what a rule is, I'll often ask the players. If I've forgotten something, I'll have them remind me. We're just playing a game; I'm not the pope.

(This mirrors what I've found after years of working in education. Young teachers, lecturers, assistant professors and so on will spout all manner of convoluted nonsense, and become red-faced and flustered in the process, in order to avoid admitting they don't know the answer to a student's query. Experienced hands are happy to say, "I don't know, but I'll look it up for next time." [If they're really boxing clever, they'll say, "I don't know, and your homework is to go away and see if you can get the answer for next week's class."]) 

The question of take-backs, though, is one I find tricky. The latest excellent post on Against the Wicked City is about those game-ruining powers of which the PCs can sometimes fall into possession: things like at-will high-speed flight, non-corporeality, mind control, and so on. Is it ever legitimate for a DM to say to the players: "This power you now have is ruining the game by making everything too easy and I should never have made it possible to have it. Let's say that tomorrow you wake up and it mysteriously no longer works"? 

This question is somewhat apropos. In my weekly campaign, the PCs have managed to get their hands on a limited form of telepathic communication (complicated because of the involvement of a third party), that almost functions like a radio operable up to infinite distance. Not apparently game-ruinous yet, but one can envisage it having such an effect. I was grateful to the players that they said, as soon as it became obvious that the strange combination of NPC allies and items that had come into their possession suddenly made an infinite walkie-talkie power possible, that they were happy for this power to somehow be revoked if it proved game-ruinous. But what if they hadn't?

I am a big proponent of giving the players agency. But at what point does agency end? At what point does it become legitimate to say, "The demigod of storms has risen in the East and now nobody can fly at will any more"? 

On Emphyrio and Vance's Libertarianism

Emphyrio is one of Vance’s most accomplished novels. It is also the closest we get to what one suspects is his personal philosophy. He had too much good taste to write allegory, but in Emphyrio he does delve into themes of political anthropology more deeply, interestingly and openly than in any other of his books.
 
The main setting of Emphyrio is the city of Ambroy, a metropolis half-ruined by ancient wars, and now ruled by families of Lords who, it is said, rebuilt its society in the aftermath of these disasters. Inhabiting towers known as “eeries” and collecting a 1.18% tithe on the products of Ambroy’s citizens (on which more below), these Lords occasionally descend to mingle with the hoi polloi, accompanied everywhere by ape-like guards known as Garrion. Otherwise they live an almost-literal “ivory tower” existence, punctuated only by trips across the stars in their space yachts.
 
The setting, then, is a curious mixture of the medieval and the futuristic. Ostensibly part of Vance’s wider Gaean Reach universe, it has nothing like the mood or feeling of a Demon Princes or Cadwal novel; the people of Ambroy inhabit if anything a world more akin to Viriconium or Nessus (and, indeed, the novel is suffused with the same kind of mood as the Viriconium and Book of the New Sun stories throughout). Their city bears some of the trappings of ancient technologies that, it is implied, are too advanced for the current inhabitants to understand (the “Overtrend”, a kind of monorail; the “Spay”, a telecommunications tool); otherwise they live like the people of pre-enlightenment Amsterdam or London, dreaming of becoming like the Lords and travelling across the stars.
 
This, though, is in practical terms impossible, because the people are kept in feudal drudgery by a system of smothering regulations administered by an almighty Welfare Agency, which has taken over the entire apparatus of public power. The people, referred to as “recipients”, receive “vouchers” in return for completing craft items of various kinds and otherwise abiding by the Agency’s regulations. These items are sold off-world, and any form of duplication or copying is hence prohibited on the basis that it will diminish the value of these artifacts and undermine the great monopoly, owned by the Lords, which controls trade.
 
Mass-manufacturing is thus outlawed; the people must in general belong to one of a number of guilds (scriveners, woodcarvers, etc.) and dedicate themselves entirely to perfecting their craft, delivering the items they make to the guild and receiving their subsistence vouchers in return. If they do anything “irregulationary”, such as duplicating an item or subjecting the regime to critique, they are visited with arcane punishments; the Agency owns a metal “deportment rod” for each inhabitant of the city, and each time one of them behaves in an irregulationary fashion, an electric charge is added to their rod, until it reaches a certain level and they are forcibly “rehabilitated”. The only release valves for the people appear to be drinking, watching the occasional puppet show or other mediocre entertainment, and their ritualistic religion, which consists mostly of inane “leaping” in complex pre-ordained patterns, designed apparently deliberately to diminish the capacity for independent thought. Their cooperation is overseen always by local Welfare Agents, each of whom takes responsibility for a small neighbourhood and makes it his business to involve himself intimately in the affairs of all of his charges. Part nosey-parker, part-social worker, part-policeman, part-NKVD operative, these Agents identify trouble-makers and “chaoticists”, and otherwise strictly enforce social harmony. The only way to escape is to become a “noncup” (for “noncuperative”) and live on the outskirts of society, receiving no public support and having to fend for oneself as a pseudo-outlaw or vagrant. Few take this route: most unthinkingly and gratefully abide by the Welfare Agency’s strictures, content to live out their lives secure in the knowledge that if they behave themselves they will always have their substantive needs met.
 
Those who have read their Tocqueville will recognise in Ambroy something akin to the dismal portrait he depicts of the fate of democracy. Democracies, Tocqueville warns us, may fall prey to violent tyranny, but they are far more vulnerable to a different kind of despotism altogether: the dominance of what, borrowing from Michel Foucault, I think of as pastoral power. Calling on us to imagine the future of the State, Tocqueville describes it as an “immense and tutelary power,” which takes it upon itself to secure the gratifications and “watch over [the] fate” of each and every individual - “absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” Like a parent who sees its task as to keep its population in perpetual childhood, such a State “willingly labours…to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living”; in “cover[ing] the surface of society” with its “network of small, complicated rules”, it does not “destroy” or “terrorise”, but “compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people” until they are reduced to “nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Ostensibly benevolent, it “chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter” of the people’s happiness, ensuring they “think of nothing but rejoicing”, and as a result robs them of their agency, their individuality, their initiative, and therefore ultimately their freedom.
 
Vance, in Emphyrio, thus places himself in a tradition of libertarian thought which is interested not so much in economics or politics but rather in the moral conditions on which freedom rests. Michael Oakeshott, in On Human Conduct, sets out two different conceptualisations of the relationship between morality and freedom: the morality of the “individual” and the “anti-individual”. In the former, moral choice is understood as properly inhering in the individual human being: it is for each person (in reference to her circumstances, culture, society, family background and so on) to decide for herself what is right or wrong in any given circumstance. In the latter, moral choice is exercised on the behalf of the population by a clerisy of experts, who create extensive laws, regulations, and policies to ensure that everybody does the “right” thing. In a system of individual morality, for example, it is up to everybody to determine for themselves whether they should eat chocolate and how much; in a system of anti-individual morality, the State must put in place “sugar taxes” to try to nudge them into eating less.
 
In no human society does individual or anti-individual morality completely prevail, and nor should it (few would wish, for example, to live in a place where the decision on whether or not to murder others is based on individual choice alone) but Ambloy is characterised very strongly by the latter. Its people are constantly supervised by the overweening and smothering presence of the Welfare Agents, who monitor what they buy, do or say so as to carefully ensure that they are never doing anything irregulationary. They cannot engage in commercial enterprise and are discouraged from spending time in any pursuit other than their allocated craft and the pointless “leaping” of their religion; their moral choices, in other words, are almost entirely circumscribed. What is right or wrong for them to do has already been predetermined in reference to the Agency’s regulations, and all that is left for them to do is to meekly obey. The quid pro quo, of course, is that they receive a continual supply of vouchers in return, such that they are relatively well-fed, well-housed, and healthy.
 
This is disastrous - a “moral enormity”, as Oakeshott would have put it – because, deprived of the capacity to make meaningful choice, the people of Ambloy are as a consequence deprived of the very conditions in which both individual freedom and morality itself are realised. What is freedom, in the end, if not the capacity to make choices, and what does morality consist of if not the exercising of choice so as to do the right thing when the wrong thing is also possible? To behave morally when the choice is pre-determined is no morality at all but merely the performance of good manners; to choose to do the right thing is not freedom at all when one is prevented from doing anything wrong in the first place. The people of Ambloy are reduced, in the end, to a mere performance of morality and hence an ultimately trivial existence: nothing they do is of consequence or import, either to themselves or others.
 
Worse than this, though, is that the habit of freedom has been drained out of them. The consequence of anti-individual morality, for Oakeshott, was that if given flight through law it would produce a population of “individual manqués” – passive, inert, lacking initiative, easily manipulated, looking always to the State to exercise choice on their behalf, and interested only in the satisfaction of a “conscript assured of his dinner.” Such a people, as Antony de Jasay warns us in The State, lose the capacity for spontaneous civic action entirely, becoming ever less capable of acting alone or with their families, friends and neighbours to solve their problems, and ever more reliant on the State to do it for them. This, as Vance shows us, is the consequence of inhabiting a society like Ambloy – an uncreative, uninteresting, and apathetic populace living out their humdrum lives, achieving nothing, going nowhere, and leaving no mark behind them when they die.
 
Vance, then, sits in the most thoughtful and provocative strand of libertarian thought, almost where it comes full circle, indeed, and overlaps with the extremes of critical theory. As Amiante, the real hero of the tale, puts it at one point: “Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox—finally irregulationary.” Freedom, in other words, is something that one has to do, to perform, at all costs – to exercise. Here, he channels the arch-crit himself, Michel Foucault, who once said that “Freedom is practice . . . [it] is what must be exercised . . . I think it can never be inherent in the structure of things to (itself) guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom.” It is not law or politics or religion or anything else which protects freedom, but the insistence of the populace on behaving freely in so far as it is possible to do so. If it fails in this task, freedom withers.
 
What is most interesting about Emphyrio is that Vance appears to have recognised that it is not only the State, but also private power, which threatens freedom on these terms. The people of Ambroy are not merely the pawns of the all-powerful Welfare Agency; they are also conscripted into guilds so that they can produce their beautiful artefacts for one single great monopolistic trading company which grows fat off the sales of their work off-world. They live out their choice-free, amoral lives not only for the furtherance of the State, in other words, but also literally for the purpose of generating wealth for the wealthy. There is in this a bleak foreshadowing of our own era, in which from an early age children are hooked on social media so that they can spend a lifetime producing the “clicks” and “eyeballs” for a few vast monopolistic firms, living lives as vapid, passive and enervated as any Oakeshottian individual manqué - their every decision pre-determined by the “choice architecture” of whatever platform they happen to inhabit at any given moment. In his recent work Matthew Crawford warns that a fundamentally passive future awaits us all unless we get back into the habit of practicing freedom for real. Emphyrio provides us with a final note of optimism that it might never be too late – but it may take an almighty hero to rescue us. 

In closing, it bears emphasising that Vance, unlike (say) Ayn Rand, was in the end a stylish, thoughtful, and tremendously entertaining writer. It is possible to read Emphyrio without considering really any of these themes, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. (I mentioned earlier that it is suffused with the mood of a Viriconium or a Book of the New Sun; I found it essentially their equal in terms of quality, and a great deal shorter to boot.) 

Humanoid=Animal Pairings

Last night, I watched a documentary that featured a segment on chimpanzees. When you see the raw power, belligerence and sadism of male chimps - the sense they give off even in repose that in a split second they could explode into violence - it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they would make great orcs.

For me, goblins are like magpies. There is something cruel about the acquisitiveness and greed of a magpie. They are constantly on the look out for food, but they also give the impression that, all things considered, they also like to inflict misery and pain while doing so. (Eating carrion is good, but eating baby sparrows alive while listening to the impotent cries of their parents is better.)

Elves work well as cats. Slinky, inscrutable, lazy, and lacking in all empathy. There is no meaningful distinction between the aesthetically pleasing and the moral; murder is justified so long as it is done beautifully.

Dwarves are badgers. Industrious, gruff, reliant on tried-and-tested heuristics rather than creative flair.

Ogres are like elephant seals. They imbue strength, size, power and aggression with religious significance; one reaches fulfilment in both inflicting and receiving suffering and pain. 

Halflings are beavers. Self-reliant and deriving pleasure only from a job well done. 

Suggest your own. 

I Have a Dream

As Pharoah came to Joseph, I call upon the nascent dream interpreters of the OSR blogosphere to tell me the meaning of the dream I had last night. (There used to be a regular commenter who was spookily good at this; is he still around?) It was the most vivid I have had in years, and, unusually, it has stuck in my memory.

In it, a friend and I had discovered the PDF of a supplement to an obscure medieval wargame, released in 2004. With great care, we were able to use this supplement to reconstruct the core rules. We then arranged to play a game of it with Daniel Craig, David Starkey, and various other more anonymous figures. This took place at night in a dimly-lit room in a flat above a shop, with a large drinks cabinet full of obscure aperitifs, like dubonnet and Ricard. Each of us had to choose a 'general' to command our forces; my friend chose Olaf from Frozen; I chose Pascal the chameleon from Tangled. I can't remember the rules or how the game was played, except that it took place on a huge tabletop that was covered with a dense forest of minis; I couldn't work out which were mine, and David Starkey kept berating me for my failings. 

The name of the game was Legendarium.

On The Force Awakens and Positive Negative Reactions

It's quite common for people to cite particular books, pieces of music, films, sporting events, and so on as major influences on the course of their lives - even as revolutionary moments. "I saw Meat Loaf performing 'You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)' in Slough in the spring of '81 and it changed me, man!"

I have my share of these, many of which are, with the benefit of hindsight, revealed as awful cliches or appallingly cringeworthy. (First picking up and reading The Two Towers as a 10- or 11-year-old; first hearing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on a dodgy cassette player on my mate's hi-fi circa 1992; seeing Nina Simone a few years before she died at the Liverpool Philharmonic; first seeing a live football match, Tranmere Rovers 3 - 0 Preston North End - an FA Cup tie around 1988; first watching Goldfinger; first reading a Fighting Fantasy book; first reading Michael Oakeshott; first listening to August and Everything After by Counting Crows as an impressionable teenager on the recommendation of girl I fancied; etc.) 

These experiences are usually remembered because of their essentially affirmative qualities. In the case of The Two Towers, for example, reading the first chapter of that book at the time I read it probably set me up for a life of being positively predisposed towards fantasy literature. I didn't know what I was reading, really (I had no idea The Fellowship of the Ring even existed), but I knew that I liked it, and I still remember the feeling of being swept along in the company of Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, three characters I had not encountered, and not knowing who they were chasing or why. 

More rarely, we remember such experiences because they were so negative they turn us off something for life. To this day I cannot enjoy the music of the Rolling Stones, for example. This is because, as a child, when I was laid out with severe flu, it so happened that Rock and Roll Circus came on the little black-and-white TV my parents had put at the foot of the bed. I had such horrible half-awake, half-asleep nightmares as a result (something about Mick Jagger in a top hat chasing me around with a horde of donkeys) that to this day I just can't bring myself to listen to the band. It's not a phobia; I don't break out in a cold sweat. I just hate them.

What very few people talk about are the dark twins of these formative experiences: the books, pieces of music, films and so on that provoke what I will call a "positive negative reaction". My example of this is The Force Awakens. I think I had already reached a point of dissatisfaction with popular culture in general at that point, but something about The Force Awakens really made me want to retreat to a 'monastery of the mind' and never come out. I don't know if it was just the fact that it was so clearly a lazy retread of Episodes IV-VI, or the forgettable dialogue, or the blithe disregard for there being any requirement to have a coherent or plausible plot or backstory, but there was something profoundly wrong with the heart of that film, in my view, that trumped the (admittedly considerable) entertainment value of watching it. It felt somehow corrupting. All that money, all that effort, all that creativity, all the cumulative hours spent in front of a screen for all those millions who watched it - wasted.

That negative experience, though, had what was in retrospect a positive influence on my life. It had an inoculating effect: ever since, I've been completely uninterested in nerd-hype. Whether it's anything Star Wars related, the Marvel films, whatever the blockbuster or boxed set of the day - I'm "double-jabbed". Not interested. You would be better off trying to get me to sit down and watch dressage. 

This has been extremely freeing, this feeling, akin to being told to go home early from school on a snow day. We live under intense pressure, I think, to always be watching the latest film, the latest boxed set, the latest series, and it's only once you're out of that mindset and you feel the sense of immense relief that comes with it that you realise that there was something unhealthy going on. I'm very happy I saw The Force Awakens, because it was a positive negative event; I've not been the same since.

Of course, the question then becomes: can there be a negative positive experience? Will I reach my death bed with the realisation that enjoying The Two Towers all those years previously harmed my life prospects in some fundamental way? Stay tuned.

The Results Are In

Regular commenters on this blog are global society's true intellectual elite, and their opinions can therefore be treated as being as near as it is possible to get to objective truth. Let us, then, pay careful heed to their answers to yesterday's questions:

1. The Best Star Wars prequel (and no, Rogue One doesn't count - you knew I meant the real ones): Revenge of the Sith. (I was shocked that Attack of the Clones gave it a run for its money. Don't make me reconsider that "intellectual elite" comment.)

2. The Best Fellowship of the Ring Member: Sam. God damn it, but Frodo almost didn't get any votes at all until right at the last second. Without JB's kids, Legolas wouldn't have had any either - I can't help but feel that this was the films' fault. Book Legolas seems like a decent sort. Film Legolas is a tit. 

3. The Best Type of Giant: Hill, pipping Stone and Fire to the post. 

4. The Best Type of Dragon: Red. No alarms and no surprises. Somebody pointed out that green dragons' lairs probably smell like swimming pools, and this observation made the whole exercise worthwhile. 

5. The Best Type of Undead: Lich. The spread of votes was wide here, but it was always between vampires and liches. No love for heucuvas, crypt things or, surprisingly, zombies (except the juju version).

What does this teach us? I think the main takeaway is that the results of polls often default to the mean. For what it's worth, my own answers were The Phantom Menace, Gandalf, Storm, Green and Ghoul.

What is Your Favourite....?

Just for the hell of it, let's do some polling. What is your favourite:

1. Star Wars prequel?

2. Fellowship of the Ring member?

3. Giant type?

4. Dragon type?

5. Undead type?

Leave a comment under the post and I will reveal them all after 24 hours have passed.